400 IMPROVEMENT OF THE HUMAN RACE 



The Remedy. — One unfortunate fact is that feeble-minded 

 people have little sense of morality, for they have stopped short of 

 normal mental development. Feeble-mindedness is a very serious 

 problem, for it is estimated that at the lowest figure there are 

 600,000 feeble-minded persons in this country, most of whom are 

 free to breed their kind. The only real remedy seems to be to 

 segregate the feeble-minded according to sexes in asylums and in 

 various ways to prevent marriage and the possibilities of perpetu- 

 ating such a low and degenerate race. Remedies of this sort have 

 been tried successfully in Europe and are now meeting with suc- 

 cess in this country. 



Blood Tells. — Eugenics shows us, on the other hand, in a study 

 of families in which brilliant men and women are found, that 

 the descendants have received the good inheritance from their 

 ancestors. 



The following, taken from Davenport's Heredity in Relation to Eugenics, 

 illustrates how one family has been famous in American history. 



In 1667 Elizabeth Tuttle, " of strong will and of extreme intellectual vigor, 

 married Richard Edwards of Hartford, Conn,, a man of high repute and great 

 erudition. From their one son descended another son, Jonathan Edwards, 

 a noted divine and president of Princeton College. Of the descendants of 

 Jonathan Edwards much has been written; a brief catalogue must suffice: 

 Jonathan Edwards, Jr., president of Union College; Timothy Dwight, presi- 

 dent of Yale ; Sereno Edwards Dwight, president of Hamilton College ; Theo- 

 dore Dwight Woolsey, for twenty-five years president of Yale College ; Sarah, 

 wife of Tapping Reeve, founder of Litchfield Law School, herself no mean lawyer ; 

 Daniel Tyler, a general in the Civil War and founder of the iron industries 

 of North Alabama; Timothy Dwight, second, president of Yale Univer- 

 sity from 1886 to 1898; Theodore William Dwight, founder and for thirty- 

 three years warden of Columbia Law School ; Henrietta Frances, wife of Eli 

 Whitney, inventor of the cotton gin, who, burning the midnight oil by the side 

 of her ingenious husband, helped him to his enduring fame ; Merrill Edwards 

 Gates, president of Amherst College ; Catherine Maria Sedgwick, of graceful 

 pen; Charles Sedgwick Minot, authority on biology and embryology in the 

 Harvard Medical School ; Edith Kermit Carow, wife of Theodore Roosevelt ; 

 and Winston Churchill, the author of Coniston and other well-known novels." 



The daughters of Elizabeth Tuttle had distinguished descendants. Robert 

 Treat Paine, signer of the Declaration of Independence ; Chief Justice of the 

 United States Morrison R. Waite; Ulysses S. Grant and Grover Cleveland, 

 presidents of the United States. These and many other prominent men and 

 women can trace the characters which enabled them to occupy the positions 

 of culture and learning they held back to Elizabeth Tuttle. 



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